Is nonduality the absolute or a contingent knowledge?

[Nilsi]

26 minutes ago, Strannik said:

Exactly. Osho is obviously a fake (even though a really smart one). I personally know someone who lived in his ashram for many years and knows what was going on as an insider, it was outrageous. But you still resonate with his madness giving you "spiritual high" rather than with precision and depth of Spira's teachings that require mundane and hard spiritual work on yourself.  That's exactly the problem. 

There is no problem.

You are the one asking for answers.

I give you an answer and you get mad at me. 

This forum in a nutshell.

[Strannik]

7 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

There is no problem.

You are the one asking for answers.

I give you an answer and you get mad at me. 

This forum in a nutshell.

I'm not mad at you, I'm concerned about you and other young people like you (purely out of compassion). You example just shows the problem in general that I was pointing to. Spirituality should not be a drug to get high on, but there are always people who want to take it as a drug, and because there is a demand, there will always be smart "spiritual drug dealers" selling this stuff.

Edited December 13, 2022 by Strannik

[Nilsi]

33 minutes ago, Strannik said:

Exactly. Osho is obviously a fake (even though a really smart one). I personally know someone who lived in his ashram for many years and knows what was going on as an insider, it was outrageous. But you still resonate with his madness giving you "spiritual high" rather than with precision and depth of Spira's teachings that require mundane and hard spiritual work on yourself.  That's exactly the problem. 

Also, what is it with you people and Rupert Spira? 

I can respect his work for making spirituality accessible to ordinary folk, but I fail to see any "depth" beyond that. 

This is like watching an elementary school teacher and getting hyped by the way he has with kids.

[Nilsi]

3 minutes ago, Strannik said:

I'm not mad at you, I'm concerned about you and other young people like you (purely out of compassion). You example just shows the problem in general that I was pointing to. Spirituality should not be a drug to get high on, but there are always people who want to take it as a drug, and because there is a demand, there will always be smart "spiritual drug dealers" selling this stuff.

Youre a cutie.

[Carl-Richard]

@thisintegrated Who approved the bot comment? 

[Strannik]

26 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Also, what is it with you people and Rupert Spira? 

I can respect his work for making spirituality accessible to ordinary folk, but I fail to see any "depth" beyond that. 

This is like watching an elementary school teacher and getting hyped by the way he has with kids.

Nonduality as a teaching is actually pretty elementary for any sufficiently intelligent person (unless you want to go into philosophical debris). It's actually practicing and changing your whole psyche to align with the teaching that is usually hard. So, it's the practical stuff that matters more, and in that respect Spira's material is pretty good IMO. 

Edited December 13, 2022 by Strannik

[Devin]

32 minutes ago, Strannik said:

I'm not mad at you, I'm concerned about you and other young people like you (purely out of compassion). You example just shows the problem

 so there is a "problem"?

 

On 12/11/2022 at 9:25 AM, Strannik said:

OK, keep dreaming in your religion of "Infinite Absolute Consciousness", there is nothing wrong with that. At least it's better than the mainstream materialism. But those who are ready will break beyond that. 

 

or is there "nothing wrong with it"?

 

 

Edited December 13, 2022 by Devin

[Strannik]

3 minutes ago, Devin said:

 so there is a "problem"?

 

or is there "nothing wrong with it"?

All our human life is a continuous flow of problems and suffering, yet there is nothing wrong with it, it's just the way it is  

We are just natural survival mechanisms trying to minimize suffering and become happier, and getting "enlightened" is just one of the natural ways to do that, and there is nothing wrong with it either

Edited December 13, 2022 by Strannik

[Devin]

2 minutes ago, Strannik said:

All our human life is a continuous flow of problems and suffering, yet there is nothing wrong with it, it's just the way it is  

and there it is

Textbook Buddhist religion, completely misunderstood buddhism but, common

Edited December 13, 2022 by Devin

[Strannik]

4 minutes ago, Devin said:

and there it is

Textbook Buddhist religion

anything taken as a contingent truth is not a religion, but just a relative view. It only becomes religion when taken as "the absolute truth".

Edited December 13, 2022 by Strannik

[Devin]

Just now, Strannik said:

anything taken as a contingent truth is not a religion. It only becomes religion when taken as "the absolute truth".

and by that you mean.... using the word absolute?

[Devin]

@Strannik I'll stop, but sincerely, i suggest you consider you may have some beliefs you're believing. and yes, in the 'absolute' way

[Carl-Richard]

@Strannik So, back to the idea that you can posit something outside formlessness which also doesn't have anything to do with our current experience of forms:

As for say materialism positing multiple ontological layers (physical vs. mental), the impulse to do so is to explain the regularities of form, e.g  why I can't read your thoughts. I also think was the main appeal of Kant's "thing in itself". And again, there you see is the innate pragmatism of philosophy. But to posit a thing which doesn't have anything to do with the forms we're experiencing and which is inaccessible to the current formlessness, a sort of formlessness 2.0, I don't think makes much sense. Even if you're claiming that there exists parallell universes, you don't need two formlessnesses for that. You just need a particular configuration of form. It's sufficient for making me unable to experience your thoughts, so it should be sufficient for hiding another whole universe away from me. When you peel back into formlessness, you won't see the parallell universes, because those are forms. You're just seeing what the universes are arising within.

Edited December 13, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Tyler Robinson]

1 hour ago, Strannik said:

I'm not mad at you, I'm concerned about you and other young people like you (purely out of compassion). You example just shows the problem in general that I was pointing to. Spirituality should not be a drug to get high on, but there are always people who want to take it as a drug, and because there is a demand, there will always be smart "spiritual drug dealers" selling this stuff.

What do you want people to do with spirituality? 

[Strannik]

34 minutes ago, Tyler Robinson said:

What do you want people to do with spirituality? 

In the modern Western environment people can and will do with spirituality whatever they want, self-productively use or self-destructively abuse it in all possible ways, there is nothing I can do about it. It's just that, if you look at ancient nondual traditions like Advaita or Buddhism (at least at the most advanced of their practitioners), it was not supposed to work as a "spiritual drug", but rather as a practical way to transform and liberate people from delusions and suffering in a spiritually healthy way. Again, I'm not suggesting to take it religiously, but see them as good examples of how spirituality can be approached in healthy and productive ways.

Edited December 14, 2022 by Strannik

[Strannik]

45 minutes ago, Devin said:

@Strannik I'll stop, but sincerely, i suggest you consider you may have some beliefs you're believing. and yes, in the 'absolute' way

Sure, I'm not claiming to be fully enlightened, and so quite likely still have a bunch of "absolute" beliefs hiding in my blind spots. But I'm working on them, so thanks for pointing.  

[Devin]

Just now, Strannik said:

Sure, I'm not claiming to be fully enlightened, and so quite likely still have a bunch of "absolute" beliefs hiding in my blind spots. But I'm working on them, so thanks for pointing.  

awesome, much love

[Strannik]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

@Strannik So, back to the idea that you can posit something outside formlessness which also doesn't have anything to do with our current experience of forms:

As for say materialism positing multiple ontological layers (physical vs. mental), the impulse to do so is to explain the regularities of form, e.g  why I can't read your thoughts. I also think was the main appeal of Kant's "thing in itself". And again, there you see is the innate pragmatism of philosophy. But to posit a thing which doesn't have anything to do with the forms we're experiencing and which is inaccessible to the current formlessness, a sort of formlessness 2.0, I don't think makes much sense. Even if you're claiming that there exists parallell universes, you don't need two formlessnesses for that. You just need a particular configuration of form. It's sufficient for making me unable to experience your thoughts, so it should be sufficient for hiding another whole universe away from me. When you peel back into formlessness, you won't see the parallell universes, because those are forms. You're just seeing what the universes are arising within.

Yeah, I get you point, I think I commented on that already, see below. It still matters from the practical perspective what kind of formlessness is at the "very bottom" in terms of whether it is accessible for direct experience (like "Pure Awareness") or not (first comment). And also, you are right only within the framework of ontology and only providing that the ontic prime is formlessness (of whatever kind it might be), which may not necessarily be the case (as per my second comment below).   

You might argue that, even if the "bottom-level ontic prime" is beyond consciousness, for us it would be practically irrelevant, and what practically matters for us is that the "upper-level" formless ontic prime (Awareness) is still available for our direct experience. That is actually how I approach this.

But things may get more tricky in some other ontological scenarios, for example, in dual-property monism or panpsychism, where there is not only formlessness but also other forms (like material forms) outside formlessness which also don't have anything to do with our current experience of forms. Of course, we would still be touching the base of the formless awareness, it would be just a derivative fundamental property rather than the ontic prime itself. The only ontological scenario where it would all be completely ruined is materialism where awareness is simply an emergent epiphenomenon and nothing special or "fundamental". 

Edited December 14, 2022 by Strannik

[Carl-Richard]

@Strannik 

Ok, so I guess your point is just that there may be things we can't know that are also extremely fundamental to reality. It sort of lends itself to the idea that the birth of the self-aware rational mind, however many thousands of years ago that was, was in a sense a step up from what existed before ("pure being"), but also, merely asking the question, or merely assuming that there can be something you don't know, is kinda self-serving to this very capacity. Anyways, blablabla 

Edited December 14, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Strannik]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

@Strannik 

Ok, so I guess your point is just that there may be things we can't know that are also extremely fundamental to reality. It sort of lends itself to the idea that the birth of the self-aware rational mind, however many thousands of years ago that was, was in a sense a step up from what existed before ("pure being"), but also, merely asking the question, or merely assuming that there can be something you don't know, is kinda self-serving to this very capacity. Anyways, blablabla 

Right. And adding to this, what makes us even dare to think that we are in principle have a cognitive or experiential capacity of knowing or understanding those things that are "extremely fundamental to reality"? It's like even the smartest monkeys or dogs are still completely incapable of understanding philosophy or mathematics. In the same way, those levels "extremely fundamental to reality" may be completely out of our reach for our human cognitive capacity. All our natural science is simply mathematical modeling of correlations of observable phenomena, there is no evidence or reason to believe that it opens to us any deeper fundamental levels of reality. And all our philosophy, academic or spiritual, is simply trying to apply reason and logic, that we developed from studying correlations of observable phenomena, to the levels "extremely fundamental to reality". What makes us think that these primitive cognitive tools of logic and reason are even applicable to those fundamental levels?

One example of our complete inability to even approach these fundamental levels is a notorious question of "why here is something rather than nothing?". Modern science and philosophy do not even have a slightest clue how to even approach this question. 

Edited December 14, 2022 by Strannik